On November 3rd, artist Sarah Rowe sat down with Peter Fankhauser, one of Amplify’s co-directors, to discuss Post on view at KANEKO until February 5th, 2023. The wide ranging conversation foregrounded collaboration, storytelling, and play—all integral components of Sarah’s practice—as relational tools that cultivate humor, healing, and care. Read through the transcript below to find links to additional resources, and share your thoughts in the comments section.

Title of Discussion: Fireside Chat with Sarah Rowe

Speaker 1: Sarah Rowe

Speaker 2: Peter Fankhauser

Date of Discussion: December 3rd, 2022

List of Acronyms: [SR] = Sarah Rowe; [PF] = Peter Fankhauser

Transcript

[PF] Welcome and thank you all for being here and thanks to KANEKO for hosting this conversation. My name is Peter. I'm a Co-Director at Amplify Arts, which is an incubator for just and equitable futures in the arts. We support our artist-driven change by providing direct financial support and critical support to artists who are working to challenge dominant historical narratives and systems. Sarah is a former grant recipient; she's been a program participant. We've been really privileged and honored to work with her in the past. Her practice exemplifies what artist-driven change looks like. I’m super grateful to be here today to talk more about her practice and this show, Post. Sara, would you mind sharing a little bit more about yourself, and in broad strokes, this exhibition--major themes and how they're translated through materials, process, and installation?

[SR] Yes, thank you all for being here. It's a great day to be around the fire. It's cold out. This project was an intense build, as you can imagine, and required a lot of collaboration. It's really just a childhood dream come true. I do have to say COVID almost knocked me off the planet last year. When I emerged on the other side of that, the title Post offered so many different meanings. I wanted it to be a haven, a space for dreaming, a space for color therapy, a space to celebrate life, and collaboration, because that's really why we're all here on the planet together. I didn't want to hang paintings on a wall. I wanted to make a space for people to enter, where a painting becomes an entire world and experience and something that changes constantly. The ADA accessible ramp we built to the treehouse is an important part of that. It's an inclusive space. One of my favorite collaborations in the exhibition is the videos of animated drawings. Please take time to stroll around after this and enjoy them. I painted the outside and the inside of the structure and these drawings that are moving are by Kelli, one of the artists at Live Yes Studios in Lincoln, a day program for adults with developmental disabilities. She became our accessibility consultant. We’re celebrating this collaboration and not pigeonholing disabled artists or Native artists or women artists or whatever. We're all just artists. So that was my jumping off point. This installation includes a lot of layers.

[PF] Right, I feel like the immersive nature of this installation is one of the most powerful aspects of it. You really do feel like you're bathed in color. As soon as you walk in the door, it really changes the way you perceive the space.

Another potent aspect of the exhibition and something you talked about beautifully in the statement for the show was the presence of Heyókȟa. And for those of you who might know, Sarah is of Ponca and Lakota descent. Heyókȟa is at the same time a trickster and knowledge carrier in Lakota cultures. I'm going to read from my notes to share a little bit more about the Heyókȟa if that’s alright.

Principally, the Heyókȟa functions both as a mirror and teacher at the same time using extreme behaviors to mirror others and forcing them to examine their own doubts, fears, hatreds, and weaknesses. They also have the power to heal emotional pain. Such power comes from the experience of shame. They sing the shameful events in their lives pay for food. They provoke laughter in distressing situations of despair and provoke fear and chaos when people feel complacent and overly secure, to keep them from taking themselves too seriously or believing that they are more powerful than they are.

In addition, Heyókȟa or sacred clowns, serve an important role in shaping Tribal Codes. Unbound by societal constraints, they are able to violate taboos freely and critique established customs. Paradoxically, however, by violating these norms and taboos, they help to define the accepted boundaries, rules, and societal guidelines for ethical and moral behavior. They're the only ones who can ask why about sensitive topics. They use satire, to question the specialists and carriers of sacred knowledge, or those in positions of power and authority.

To offer some historical context about the importance of Heyókȟa in Lakota culture, John Fire Lame Deer who was Miniconjou-Lakota born on the Rosebud Reservation and had a wild life as a rodeo clown, member of the Peyote Church, policeman, and activist who worked with the American Indian Movement to campaign for the return of the Black Hills, Lakota land illegally and forcibly seized by the US government when gold was discovered in the area, said:

“For people who are as poor as us, who have lost everything, who had to endure so much death and sadness, laughter is a precious gift. When we were dying like flies from white man's disease, when we were driven into reservations, when the government rations did not arrive and we were starving, watching the pranks and capers of Heyókȟa were a blessing.”

I felt that was so emotionally resonant and that maybe there are a couple threads we can pull here that tie the roles of the Heyókȟa in Lakota culture to the roles of artists broadly speaking. I’m especially thinking about the Heyókȟa’s ability to question societal norms and challenge people in authority. I wanted to ask Sarah, if you could talk a little bit more about Lakota cosmologies and the presence of Heyókȟa in this work specifically, but also its influence on the way you move through the world as an artist.

[SR] Thank you for sharing that. The Heyókȟa is central to all of my work, whether it's small paintings or large installations like this. It's the central driving force and part of my iconography. My personal interpretation of Heyókȟa greets you as you come into the space, which for me, is depicted as a being with a horse head. It's spilling this cosmic knowledge and hopefully laughter and playfulness upon everyone that enters into the space with a nice hello. So that that is my interpretation of the Heyókȟa or the trickster, the clown. I believe laughter and play are central to our healing and our connection. If we lose that sense of playfulness, if we lose our sense of humor, we've lost the battle. I feel like laughter is resilience, especially in Native culture. Laughter is so important, especially when we're talking about these complex and disturbing histories that we've emerged from and we're trying to reconcile. I believe having that playfulness keeps our work aligned with healing and reconciliation. I hope that that's what my work brings with it, that sense of storytelling and inspiring people to share stories. I think that these figures kind of invoke that sort of storytelling spirit.

[PF] Play and humor both feel very present in this exhibition, in the physical iteration of the work, but also in the sense that you've collaborated with a lot of people and plan to collaborate with even more in this space. Can you talk about the relationship between collaboration and play?

[SR] I have to mention, this is my first big collaboration with my daughter Lyla. You can hear the soundscape she recorded with Shawn Foree of Digital Leather, an amazing synth player. My daughter's an amazing keyboard player. I think having that connection with my childhood self and with my own child was so exciting. I wanted to celebrate our relationship as well. I love that her voice through music is resonating through this space and layered with all of these collaborations: the movement of Kelli's drawings, John Paul Gurnett’s videos and these beautiful cloud images he's super imposed, the videos we made with a Kaleidoscope during this nice walk through the woods with his dog Morty. Morty actually felt that installation this was his house. When he came in, he walked right up the ramp into the treehouse and stayed there. I love all of these different beings coming into the work. It's intergenerational, interspecies, and that's a really beautiful thing to celebrate. Collaboration, in a way, takes the human story out of the center and we see how we fit alongside these other beings, whether they’re cosmic beings, our pets, plants, or animals we see in the woods. I love that there's so many different collaborations, even in these little moments in these videos. It’s exciting to me.

[PF] So play also becomes kind of a tool for building relationality, both within and outside of the work.

[SR] Right and this whole thing wouldn't exist if I hadn't been obsessing over kaleidoscopes lately. The Heyókȟa literally teaches you to change your perspective. If you're in a state of despair, hop on the other side. Look at things from a different angle. I was in my studio one night and had just finished a large painting of a family of Thunderbirds. I picked up the kaleidoscope that I carry on my keychain and was looking at my painting through it and it occurred to me that I should always inspect my work through a Kaleidoscope before I share it with the world. So I started making these videos. They started with a piece in honor of my daughter during my residency at the Great Plains Art Museum earlier this year. I love the fractals and the colors and the way you only get glimpses of some of the iconography. The video I made for my daughter came out of looking at my paintings from another angle through the kaleidoscope. I called it Dance of the Rabbit and Thunderbird, a Gift for Lyla. It was a catalyst for the videos in this exhibition. They just kept growing. If I hadn't picked up that little toy up and changed my perspective, this whole installation wouldn’t have taken shape like it did.

[PF] I love that. I also love the idea that this installation is a fractured static image rebuilt and restructured to envelop the viewer. How do you think about collaboration in your work as it relates to notions of authorship, ownership, those things that artists can become very attached to? How do you think collaboration reframes some of those ideas?

[SR] I don't own anything. Artists say that all the time, but it's really true. I'm just a vessel, I have these sparks of ideas that hit me like lightning, and I just try to share them with others. I can't own this as an installation, because it's Kelli's work and John Paul’s work, and it's my daughter's music. If it was just these paintings, I could say, yeah, I made these paintings, but collaboration makes that idea more diffuse, which I love. The idea of ownership is complicated, of course. I'm just honored to be a channel for these collaborations, and I take that seriously. It's a responsibility being an artist and there’s responsibility in working with others. I take ownership of my choices, but the visions themselves are very sacred. That's really not mine. It's everyone's.

[PF] That's such a beautiful way to foreground the idea that you're creating situations and building a framework and then inviting other people to share their perspectives within that framework.

[SR] Right. That's the community aspect is really important to the work. I hope you'll all make some marks over here. This castle wall is our community space that I love watching evolve in a way I could never have predicted. Everyone is invited to contribute, and it will continue to grow and evolve until the exhibition closes. Then it will become something else. I love the idea that you can see the evidence of so many hands and so many marks and that we all get to make a mess together.

[PF] Speaking of making a mess together, I also want to plug Lyric, Sarah's exhibition at Amplify’s Generator Space on Vinton Street. It describes a 20-year collaboration and friendship between two artists in a really beautiful and eloquent way. Would you mind talking a little bit more about that intense person-to-person collaboration that that shaped Lyric?

[SR] That's definitely more of an intimate collaboration, which is exciting. Lyric is the micro scale. Post is the macro scale, which is kind of cool. Karen Bauer, who’s an oil painter, is my collaborator. Her oil paintings line one side of the gallery, and I have some smaller pen and ink watercolor pieces on the other wall. And then there's this explosion of our 20-year friendship that has mostly been across the ocean as she was living in the Netherlands on the back gallery wall. Putting that work together was actually a difficult process and it’s a hard show for me to share with the world because it's so personal. It’s a celebration of how words and marks and music can keep two humans connected even across an ocean for decades. All of these threads tie together. Even though it seems very different, it's really not. It's just work on a different scale.

[PF] I couldn't agree more. Maybe now is a good time to open the floor to questions and hear more about what you all are thinking and feeling about the exhibition. If anybody has questions they would like to offer or thoughts, please feel free.

[Audience Member] I wondered if you could speak a little bit about place and what it means to you in your work.

[SR] Well, I'm Lakota, which is a nomadic tribe. I've never owned a home. I don't have any land. I'm also an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe and we are on stolen Ponca land right now. So, there are some really complex and difficult issues, obviously, as a Native person talking about home and place. I think, ultimately, I wanted Post to be a respite from that. There's color therapy, and there's joy, because we really need that levity in the world. So, in a very simple way, inviting people into this space of quiet and reflection, and breath, I hope that brings people home, in a way, within themselves. You sit and hopefully you feel the joy and peace of being held.

[Audience Member] I was wondering if, as you were making this, whether you had any trouble getting into like the mindset of play. I feel like it's difficult to leave that rationality behind and fall into the expression of play.

[SR] Since I came back to life from COVID, I have literally felt like a joyful manic. So, it was not hard at all. I have been so excited to be able to embrace these opportunities and invite people in in exciting and unexpected ways that I felt fueled. It nourished my spirit. The team here of course, they were all brilliant co-conspirators and I have to thank them. They helped bring this work to life.

[Audience Member] Can you talk more about your imagery and the choice of the horse? Why us that meaningful to you?

[SR] Humans and horses have such a natural, ancient connection. I love horse-power. That's real power. And it's humbling working with horses. I didn't ride for a long time so I would paint horses into my life. That connection will always be there not just because of my culture, but I the freedom I feel when I ride and the sacredness of caring for animals and honoring their power. I love celebrating that in the work.

[PF] I feel like we've talked a lot about play in the context of childhood experience. I'm curious to know a little bit more about how you position play in your practice as an adult. How you keep that door open to play, to experimentation, to questioning and challenging in your practice, as an older person?

[SR] Well, having a child helps. She keeps me on my toes. I think working in different media and having a lot of adventurous friends and collaborators is also a really big part of it. All my collaborators in this work were on board from the get-go. Collective inspiration and bouncing ideas off each other helps the work. That openness invites the spirit of play and the right energy to a space.

[Audience Member] Recently, I've been thinking about gender-based access and the idea that sometimes young children are not given the same type of toys to play with. They grow up with a narrower understanding of what they can do, maybe. I wonder how you think about gender in terms of your work and how collaboration has helped you expand your world.

[SR] I try to be intentional about having balance in collaboration. I look at my collaborators just in this room. They come from all different backgrounds and walks of life. I think that adds to the richness of experience. We all need to play. We all need the arts. It's central to our humanity. So hopefully this space expands that idea and invites people of all ages and genders to interact with the work freely.

[PF] I echo that. The arts are a productive space for transdisciplinary and cross disciplinary collaborations that allow for distilling complex concepts like gender into formats that resonate both intellectually and emotionally. Thank you for doing that work, Sarah and thank you for inviting us into this incredible space. Thanks to all of you for coming and KANEKO for organizing this conversation. Please take some time to enjoy the exhibition!

Sarah Rowe is an interdisciplinary artist based in Omaha, NE. Her work opens cross cultural dialogues by utilizing methods of painting, casting, fiber arts, performance, and Native American ceremony in unconventional ways. Rowe’s work is participatory, a call to action, and re-imagines traditional Native American symbology to fit the narrative of today’s global landscape. Rowe holds a BA in Studio Art from Webster University, studying in St. Louis, MO, and Vienna, Austria. She is of Lakota and Ponca descent.

Post in on view at KANEKO through February 5th, 2023. Please visit their website for gallery hours and details about additional programming: https://thekaneko.org/.

Sarah Rowe | 'Post' Fireside Chat

Transcript

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